


Saxophone Soliloquy

by Pearl_Pilots_In_Chains



Category: Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Dark, Gen, Heavy Angst, contemplations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-25 03:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14967812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearl_Pilots_In_Chains/pseuds/Pearl_Pilots_In_Chains
Summary: JD ponders the status of his life and is generally angsty.





	Saxophone Soliloquy

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally a scene from a longer work, which I ended up discarding. This is one of several vignettes that I recovered from it. This scene was heavily inspired (on an emotional level, at least) by the song "Baker Street" (by Gerry Rafferty). I will say that it is mildly AU, in the sense that JD is slightly more stable here than he is in canon.

            JD, as he preferred to be called, collapsed onto his bed with a barely audible sigh, saxophone in hand.  He turned his head and looked out the window.  He held an interesting, and probably irrational love for the night sky.  It was one of the relative constants in a life that, for the most part, was devoid of any such foundations.  The moon, the stars, the constellations.  These things were eternal.  Or at least they were in the scope of his life.  Not that there was much comfort to be found in celestial bodies.  It’s not as if they actually had any sway in the events that occurred on this speck in the cosmos that he called home, even if some idiots held onto to the preposterous belief that they did.  He shunned all such lunacy.  He considered himself a man of logic.  A man of truths, or at least true principles.  If life was a hell consisting of the madness that pervaded mundane existence, then he was a prophet bringing the word of god to the damned. That is, if that word was written in the universal language of music, and god was, by some utterly absurd twist of fate, Raphael Ravenscroft.

 

            Leaving his sax behind, JD dragged himself up off of his bed, and lackadaisically sauntered over to his stereo cabinet.  He rooted through one of the boxes of cassettes sitting on the floor by it, and after a minute or two of searching, retrieved the album he was looking for.  He popped it out of the case, and into the deck.  He cranked the volume.  His dad was passed out drunk on the couch downstairs anyway.  The familiar sounds of the soft intro to “Baker Street” began to issue from the speakers.  He grabbed his sax back off of his bed and waited for the moment when the intro would build into the instantly recognizable sax line.

 

            Music was his escape.  His portal to heaven from the mire of shit that this world was. The numbing agent that removed pain, physical and emotional.  When he drowned beneath the waves of soaring synths, rumbling drums, and resonating guitars, there were no more memories.  There were no more nightmares.  There were no more explosions.  He could forget his mother’s face looking out of a dingy library window, at least for a moment, and disregard the fact that his father was a demon who wore the skin of a wretched man.  Auditory stimulation was his substitute for cocaine and cutting, and all the vices that the denizens of this hellish realm turned to for some reprieve from the misery that could only be described as a “side effect of breathing.”  Or so he liked to believe.

 

            His cassettes and his sax went with him wherever he and his father roamed.  Being the son of someone who owned a “deconstruction company” meant that roaming was a given.  There was always some type of work to be done somewhere.  But once it was done, it was time to get the hell out of there. Possibly because an angry mob of citizens was trying to kill you.  It sufficed to say, JD was an expert in traveling.

  

            One might think that due to all this traveling, he would have had a true variety of experiences, especially with regards to the great institution that is public education.  But that was nearly the opposite of reality.  Perhaps the strangest, and most depressing part of his parentally-enforced journey was that everyplace was the same in the end.  Each school had the same classes, the same cliques, the same interests, and the same stupid people.  Only the names and the locker combinations changed.  It would be enough to drive any normal person insane.  Fortunately, he was far from normal.  He had long ago given up on trying to achieve that status, that so many others took for granted.

 

            As the song came to a close, he slumped back down onto his bed, setting his sax on the table beside him.  He gazed up at the ceiling.  To an outside observer, it might have looked like he was attempting to analyze every little intricacy of it.  His mind was elsewhere, of course, as it often was.  He was ruminating, no, brooding, over the fact that tomorrow would be the first day of school.  The first day of his senior year.  “How am I even still alive?”  He muttered to himself, perhaps looking for an answer from within, or perhaps interrogating his ceiling, hoping that by some divine-or demonic-providence, it would reply.  Sadly, neither his mind nor the ceiling replied, leaving only an oppressive silence, that hung like a mist in the summer night air.

 

            He shook his head, and dislodged his dark thoughts, albeit temporarily.  He sounded crazy, even to himself, most of the time.  He knew he was broken.  He knew he was a mess.  He was no prophet.  He was no better than the people he looked on with contempt.  Life just fucked him over differently than it did them.  If you stuck around someone long enough to actually get to know them, you’d see that eventually.  Of course, that had only happened a handful of times in his life. So, he could have just gotten lucky. Maybe people were truly as despicable as they seemed.  Maybe there was no motivation, no malady behind their actions.  Maybe some people liked to be evil of their own volition. He wasn’t sure.  He hoped that theory was wrong though.  Yet, some days he couldn’t help but agree with it.

 

            As to whether life truly was simply a prelude to an eternal hell, or better yet, hell itself, he couldn’t say.  Most days it felt like it was, or that if it wasn’t, it was trying damn hard to be.  Maybe the world secretly had a passionate crush on hell and was just trying to emulate it.  That seemed as equally grounded in logic as some of the explanations people had behind their beliefs.

 

            So tomorrow would be the first day of another, likely short, chapter of his journey.  He imagined that it would be par for the course at this point.  He dared the world to prove him wrong.  To prove that it wasn’t trying to be hell. “Do your worst to be heaven, just for a day,” he murmured, letting the words hang in the stillness of the August evening.

**Author's Note:**

> Raphael Ravenscroft is the saxophonist who plays on "Baker Street."


End file.
